


Electric Sheep

by UnderTheFridge



Category: Aliens (1986)
Genre: Androids, Gen, Insomnia, Various headcanons, sorry Artificial People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 19:10:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5551898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderTheFridge/pseuds/UnderTheFridge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On an unknown mission, on an unnamed colony, the marines get comfy for a well-earned rest - except Hicks.<br/>Thankfully, there's always at least one (artificial) person he can go to...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Electric Sheep

When there’s nothing else to do but sleep, the squad will happily do so. Even if there are other things to do, most of them will sleep if they can get away with it, flopping in a convenient location like cats and passing out for a few minutes. It’s a running joke that Vasquez can nap between push-ups. She denies this. Drake swears he can hear her snoring.

It’s him that’s snoring at the moment, out on his back in the only part of the whole room that gives him enough space to lie. Hicks considers going over and kicking him, though it probably wouldn’t do much good. Drake can sleep through physical attack, gunfire, alarms of all types, and seismic activity, and he’s not the only one.

Hudson is an annoyingly light sleeper, and always wakes up grumpy. He’s active as well, and at the moment small whimpers and hiccups escape him. His fists clench and he twists, as if to evade some unseen impaling attempt. He’s having a nightmare, Hicks is sure of it - the reason he’s avoiding sleep himself at the moment. (Also the reason he regularly drops off in situations that  _ really  _ don’t call for it.)

A lean figure detaches from the shadows around the control panel, where a few tiny lights blink lazily and unproductively. Hicks lies still and watches.

“Private.”

Hudson whines in the back of his throat - far removed from his usual whining; this is a sound of abject fear.

“Hudson.”

He reacts to his shoulder being shaken, grabbing the hand responsible by the wrist in a grip that would pain human bones, and wakes trembling.

“You were dreaming.”

“Ah… yeah, thanks man.” He might already be forgetting what exactly plagued him in his nightmare, but it’s clear he’s grateful to be pulled out. “It was… bad….”

“Try to relax,.”

“Yeah, will do….” The voice of a man falling back asleep. He’s left in peace by the one member of the party that never has need for any of that.

Hicks watches the lights, and gets distracted by their pattern. They tell him nothing - all he knows is that they are still four days or so away from extraction, without allies or enemies in this abandoned spit of a colony, and with nowhere to go.

He doesn’t want to have to deal with a bored and restless squad while running on empty.

While he’s watching the lights, sleep sneaks up and manages a stealth takedown.

-

He’s in this mess again, with no way out. They’ve turned again - his friends, his comrades, people he knows and people he cares about - and they’re chasing him as zombies, or mutants, or whatever it is this time. He wants to run forever but he’s so, so slow… if he could only get a door between them….

He’s not worried about being eaten. He just doesn’t want to have to shoot them.

They’re hideous and twisted, shadows of their former selves, but there’s something alive in their eyes. Perhaps he’s deluding himself, and that’s the most terrifying part: the idea that his judgement, dealing with these horrid creatures, could be clouded by the fact that he was too sentimental to admit they were  _ gone _ , the people he loved were  _ gone _ , replaced with whatever these were.

Rotted hands snatch at his armour - he’s in full combat gear, of course he is - and he pulls away, still wading through treacle as he tries to run. There’s no way he can stand to look back, but that’s traditionally how one aims, and inside a spacecraft - he’s in the ship, of course he is - to fire blindly down a corridor risks hull breach and decompression. That’s not how he wants to die. 

Another primal terror there, to add to the list: he doesn’t want to die in space. Anything else can happen, as long as he’s taken down fighting the good fight and not just because he’s a puny meatbag who isn’t built for exposure to freezing vacuum. The thought of his body drifting in the void makes his skin crawl. Anything but that.

The fear and desperation are piling on now as another set of doors closes behind him too slowly and they claw their way through. They’re calling him, in those voices he knows, voices he would prefer silenced rather than subjected to  _ this _ ; calling him like sirens.

“Corporal….”

Now there’s a voice that never joins the rest. He’s pretty sure that it’s not from lack of familiarity, though. More like an intuition, at the most basic level, that zombieism is never going to be the fate of this guy.

“I’d like you to wake up now.”

A request that makes a lot of sense, and the zombies spill through the corridor. His pulse rifle is heavy in his hands, and he’s going to have to turn around and gun down everyone he loves, once again, though it causes him such unbearable pain. He always wakes gasping, sometimes with tears on his face, but the only other way that the nightmare ends (being torn to pieces as they laugh at him for ever loving them) leaves him in exactly the same state. And his dream-self prefers to go down fighting.

Someone is gently grasping his arm. He summons all his strength and  _ knows _ he has to wake up - and it’s like surfacing from underwater with a searing breath of clean air. His body jolts back to reality, nerves fizzing.

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah, I… yeah. How - how do you know we’re dreaming?”

“Your heart rate spikes, your eyes move. From what I can sense, your nervous system just… lights up. I’ll only intervene if you’re in distress….”

“Yeah, I was. Nightmare.”

“A recurrent one.”

“It is.” He realises, eventually, that he’s holding the synthetic’s hand, and rearranges his fingers. “Every few months, I get a stack of them.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” The question is pitched low and close - obviously to avoid disturbing the others, but Hicks can’t help feeling that they now have this as a secret between them. It makes sense. He’s never admitted his nightmares to anyone else. “I can wake you up if it starts again.”

“It’s ok. I can deal with it, it’s not… not that bad. You don’t have to come all the way over here. Unless… hm. Fuck it. I’ll come over there.”

He ends up sitting beside the control panel, watching the lights blink from closer in, and falling prey to their hypnotic rhythm again. This time, hands support him and guide him to lie across the bench, and there’s an ever-vigilant presence beside him which prevents him descending into the nightmare.

-

Hicks discovers how much he likes uninterrupted sleep. When they get out of here, he won’t be able to rely on this - but while he has that advantage, he might as well make the most of it. He rests nearby, then beside, then leaning against, and finally on top of, his cybernetic comfort blanket, and finds it all perfectly logical. When he’s awake, they’re awake together, and they can talk while the rest breathe slowly behind them.

He looks up momentarily and sees that Drake, who lay down with a companionable arm across Vasquez, has rolled over to the other side and is all but spooning one of the heavy guns. Some people, it seems, have a thing for equipment.

A bead chain touches cold on his temple as he lowers his head again. An attack of curiosity motivates him to reach in and draw out the dog tags. They glint in front of his face; the seal of the Marine Corps and the Weyland-Yutani logo paired on the outer surface. He props both elbows across Bishop’s stomach and inspects the tags’ embossed information.

“What does the L stand for?” There is an initial on the 2nd line, which he wasn’t expecting.

“It doesn’t. Well, besides Lunar Manufacturing Facility: some of my counterparts use that.”

Hicks is about to say that that’s hardly a name, but reconsiders for fear of hurting Bishop’s feelings. If he has them. His artificial feelings. His programmed responses.

Hicks wants to  _ think _ he has feelings, anyway, and isn’t that reason enough?

“And I’m guessing ‘synt’ is….”

“I don’t have a blood type.”

“No, I guess not....” Hicks runs his thumb over the raised letters. His own tags are as vital to him as his fingernails. Everyone in the Corps would probably say the same. Your tags are a part of your body, and having them means you  _ are _ a body… and sometimes they come home in place of your body.

“You’re personnel,” he says, “not equipment.”

“I am. Although, it’s a grey area.”

Hicks makes a questioning sound and shifts position. Resting his head on a person’s chest would usually allow him to hear their heartbeat through their clothing and skin - not the case here. He detects an intermittent ‘swish-bump’ kind of sound, which he thinks might be the hydraulic pump. So, a heartbeat of sorts.

“In terms of operations, I’m a person… but if I’m injured, do you send me to the medical bay? No. Protocol dictates I get put in for maintenance, so I’m equipment. Uniform is issued to personnel, and they go into stasis for travel. But equipment doesn’t have possessions, or a bed space. Personnel get their next of kin notified if they die. Equipment is replaced. And these… I don’t know. You might want to put in a request, just in case.” 

_ If you care about me that much, _ is the part he doesn’t say, whether out of sentimentality or a complete lack of it.

“They’d replace you if you died?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“But would you be… you?”

“No. It wouldn’t be me. If you were able to retrieve my personality, though, then you could have it uploaded… and he’d be functionally identical….”

This is getting a little deep for Hicks. He doesn’t want to think about the complexities of a sense of self… but more importantly, he doesn’t want to think about losing their artificial comrade. Especially since he’s so comfortable.

“Bishop?”

“Hm.”

“What  _ is _ that sound? In your chest.”

“It’s the hydraulic pump.”

“Thought so.”


End file.
